The Spiritual Aftermath

After Dvořák’s eventual departure from the National Conservatory in 1895, the New World Symphony continued to be a flash point in discussions about the relationships between African American and European American music and musicians, particularly the repertoire known as “Negro spirituals.” White American-born composers, such as Henry F. Gilbert and John Powell, continued to complain about lack of representation on concert programs while failing to support their Black counterparts, who leveraged relationships with figures inside and outside the musical world to create new social networks for finding professional success. In the early 1930s, William Dawson and Florence Price became the first Black composers to premiere symphonies drawing musical inspiration from early African American vernacular song and dance.

Tamiris, Helen (1902–1966)

Helen Tamiris was a key figure in the development of American modern dance; along with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm, she helped to forge the art form. Born Helen Becker to an immigrant Russian Jewish family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she was introduced to dance at the Henry Street Settlement House. After a brief stint in the ballet world and on the commercial stage, she gained recognition as a concert dancer with a suite of dances set to Negro Spirituals. These signature works established her reputation as a choreographic voice for the oppressed; themes of social protest inspired her throughout her career. As a political activist she promoted collective bargaining for dancers, organized collaborative ventures with other early modern dancers, and led the campaign to create a Federal Dance Project for unemployed dancers during the Depression years. She was unusual among early moderns in her desire to reach a broad popular audience, and in the 1940s and 1950s choreographed a succession of Broadway musicals, receiving critical acclaim for choreography in shows such as Annie Get Your Gun and Plain and Fancy. Her political engagement and her success in bridging the divide between high art and popular culture distinguish her among American modern dancers.

The Myth of the Chosen Nation

The American myth of the Chosen Nation has its deepest roots in the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the English Reformation, on the other. William Tyndale, through his 1534 translation of the New Testament, popularized the notion that England was a chosen nation. Convinced that England had broken its covenant with God, the New England Puritans applied that myth to themselves. In their hands, the chosen people myth became a tool that justified oppression of both native people and enslaved Africans. By the revolutionary period, this myth had become a staple of the American imagination, accepted and used even by America’s founders. The myth of the Chosen Nation assumed both the objective reality of “white people” and the superiority of “white people” over people of color. In the Negro spirituals, enslaved blacks turned the American myth of chosenness upside down, claiming that they were God’s chosen people, suffering in an American Egypt, and waiting for God to deliver them out of American bondage into a promised land, a story to which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed on the eve of his assassination in 1968. Other blacks developed countermyths such as “Yacub’s History,” related by Malcolm X.

Of the burning

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "Of the Burning" is a hybrid collection of nonfiction essays and sermon-poems. The narrative threads weaved through the collection include original archival research into the life and work of Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), historical research into the year German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) spent in New York City (1930-31), and my own autobiographical recollections of serving as a vicar in a multicultural black church in the Bronx (2005-07). The original archival research consists primarily of work with Johnson's manuscripts for his books God's Trombones (1927) and The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), accessed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in October 2016.